Facebook Steps Up Attack on Man Who Claims Ownership

John Anderson/Wellsville Daily ReporterPaul Ceglia, who claims he owns half of Facebook, at his home.

Facebook on Thursday sharpened its attack on Paul Ceglia, a New York man who says that a 2003 work-for-hire contract with Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, entitles him to half of Mr. Zuckerberg’s stake in the social media giant.

In a legal motion filed in federal court in Buffalo, Facebook provided details and expert testimony to support its claims that the contract at the center of Mr. Ceglia’s lawsuit was doctored and that a series of purported e-mails between the two men was fabricated. In addition, Facebook said Mr. Zuckerberg has sworn under oath that he neither signed the contract put forward by Mr. Ceglia, nor sent or received the purported e-mails that Mr. Ceglia has presented as evidence.

In 2003, while Mr. Zuckerberg was a freshman at Harvard, he agreed to do programming work for Mr. Ceglia’s business, StreetFax.

Mr. Ceglia has not yet produced the original version of the contract that is supposed to show that their agreement also covered Mr. Zuckerberg’s project, then called The Facebook.

But Facebook said it had copies of the two-page contract examined by Frank Romano, a professor emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology and an expert in document authentication. Professor Romano found “significant inconsistencies” in type sizes, spacing, margins and other details between pages 1 and 2. He concluded that Page 1 and Page 2 were printed at different times on different printers and that Page 1, which includes references to The Facebook Book, is an “amateurish forgery,” according to the motion.

Facebook said it also had Mr. Zuckerberg’s e-mail account at Harvard examined by a digital forensic expert and found that the e-mails Mr. Ceglia provided do not exist. The expert also found 175 other e-mails between the two men that never mentioned The Facebook, the company wrote in the motion.

The e-mails also show Mr. Ceglia apologizing for failing to pay Mr. Zuckerberg. “These indisputably genuine e-mails — as they appear on the account maintained by Harvard University — directly contradict the invented narrative set forth in Ceglia’s Amended Complaint and establish beyond any possible doubt that the purported e-mails Ceglia discusses in his Amended Complaint are fabrications,” Facebook wrote in the motion.

Facebook also said it found further evidence of Mr. Ceglia’s checkered past. Mr. Ceglia was previously known to have pleaded guilty to possession of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Texas in 1997, and to have been arrested and charged with defrauding customers of his wood-pellet business by Andrew Cuomo last year, when Mr. Cuomo was then the New York State attorney general. In the motion, Facebook said that in 2005, “Ceglia was arrested in Florida for trespass while trying to sell property in a private orange grove to an elderly couple.” Mr. Ceglia pleaded no contest and paid a fine, Facebook said. “That trespass incident appears to be part of a wide-ranging criminal land scam involving the fraudulent sale of land in New York and Florida,” Facebook said.

Facebook is asking the court to expedite discovery and compel Mr. Ceglia to produce the ink-and-paper version of the contract. It also asks the court to compel Mr. Ceglia to produce the e-mails in original electronic form and to seize his computers so they can be examined by forensic experts.

“This motion confirms, through expert testimony and other powerful evidence, what we have said all along: this case is an egregious fraud,” said Orin Snyder, a partner at Gibson Dunn, who represents Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook in the case.

In response to a reporter’s questions about the case, Mr. Ceglia’s lawyer issued this statement: “Mr. Ceglia welcomes the opportunity to expedite discovery in this case and disagrees with the opinions within the filing, which have been made by those who have not examined the actual contract at issue in this case or any of the other relevant evidence.”